Research advances concerning the heat-transfer turbulent structure of drag-reducing surfactant solutions

The drag-reducing surfactants feature a long service life and produce no degradations when compared with various polymer additives, and have been widely used in centralized district heating (cooling) systems. As the surfactants reduce the fluid turbulent friction drag, they will also deteriorate the heat transfer performance of the surfactant solution. To expand their applications in the heat transfer domain and understand the cause of the deterioration in heat transfer performance, some experimental study and theoretical analyses have been conducted of the turbulent heat transfer structures for the surfactant solutions. However, the foregoing is still at an exploratory stage and no final conclusion has been drawn. To facilitate further study, an analysis with a summing-up was performed of the recent research on turbulent heat transfer structures and of the achievements made both at home and abroad. Moreover, the problems existing in the current research were also analyzed with personal viewpoints being presented for future studies.